In unincorporated Fox Lake, Illinois, 28-year-old Daniel Wyman
drowned after he and a companion inadvertently blew a hole in the bottom
of their boat with an M-250 firecracker. The M-250 firecracker is the
equivalent of one-fourth of a stick of dynamite. Daniel Wyman and his
friend threw the firecracker into the water near their 14-foot aluminum
rowboat. The boat was caught by a gust of wind that pushed the boat over
the explosive. The boat was not equipped with life preservers; Wyman,
who could not swim, drowned when the boat sank. His companion swam to
shore and was taken to Northern Illinois Medical Center in McHenry for
observation. Fox Lake Fire Capt. Thomas Preidis said that the device
probably had floated back to the surface when it exploded; otherwise the
cushion of water between the explosive and the boat probably would have
prevented a breach of the hull. "We really don’t know why it
happened," Preidis said. "It’s getting close to the 4th of
July, and people like to blow off fireworks. When you throw an M-250 in
the water it makes a nice big geyser. Then again, they may have been
trying to scare fish to the surface."

BUXTON, N.C. A man died on a beach when an 8-foot-deep hole he
had dug into the sand caved in as he sat inside it. Beachgoers said
Daniel Jones,21, dug the hole for fun, or protection from the wind, and
had been sitting in a beach chair at the bottom Thursday afternoon when
it collapsed, burying him beneath 5 feet of sand. People on the beach
on the Outer Banks used their hands and shovels, trying to claw their
way to Jones, a resident of Woodbridge, Va., but could not reach him. It
took rescue workers using heavy equipment almost an hour to free him
while about 200 people looked on. Jones was pronounced dead at a
hospital. You just wouldn’t believe the outpouring of concern, people
digging with their hands, using pails from kids," Dare County
Sheriff Bert Austin said.

In February, Santiago Alvarado, 24, was killed in Lompoc, Calif., as
he fell face-first through the ceiling of a bicycle shop he was
burglarizing. Death was caused when the large flashlight he had placed
in his mouth (to keep his hands free) crammed against the base of his
skull as he hit the floor.

According to police in Dahlonega, Ga., ROTC cadet Nick Berrena, 20,
was stabbed to death in January by fellow cadet Jeffrey Hoffman, 23, who
was trying to prove that a knife could not penetrate the flak vest
Berrena was wearing.

Sylvester Briddell, Jr., 26, was killed in February in Selbyville,
Del., as he won a bet with friends who said he would not put a revolver
loaded with four bullets into his mouth and pull the trigger.

In February, according to police in Windsor, Ont., Daniel Kolta, 27,
and Randy Taylor, 33, died in a head-on collision, thus earning a tie in
the game of chicken they were playing with their snowmobiles.

A 49-year-old San Francisco stockbroker, who "totally zoned
when he ran," according to his wife, accidentally jogged off of a
200-foot-high cliff on his daily run.

In Detroit, a 41-year-old man got stuck and drowned in two feet of
water after squeezing headfirst through an 18-inch-wide sewer grate to
retrieve his car keys.

A 7-year- old boy fell off a 100-foot-high bluff near Ozark, Ark.,
after he lost his grip swinging on a cross that marked the spot where
another person had fallen to his death in 1990.